The Bridge to Joni

SHEROES is on The Road To Joni, but in this episode we discover
that sometimes that road is a bridge. A bridge to healing. A bridge
to holding your own. A bridge to a new creative path. A bridge from
one generation to another. Episode 4 of the Road To Joni begins at
the SHEROES studio in upstate New York with 5x platinum recording
artist and activist Natalie Merchant. A long time friend of host
Carmel Holt, they discovered that they were both Joni Mitchell fans
at a 1999 at breast cancer benefit concert that Carmel organized
and Natalie headlined. The closing song from that show was a cover
of Joni Mitchell’s “All I Want.” 25 years later, Natalie Merchant
sits down with Carmel to reflect on her road to Joni, talks about
crying at her kitchen table after missing Joni's return at Newport
Folk 2022, and shares an exclusive listen to a previously
unreleased recording of her cover of "All I Want" from her personal
archives. Then, it's on to Newport Folk Fest 2024, where 4x Grammy
Award Nominee Madison Cunningham (who also missed Joni's 2022
Newport performance) recalls listening to Court and Spark and
feeling like Joni was looking into her soul. The self-taught guitar
and songwriting prodigy tells us that her road to Joni is more of a
bridge, partly because of all the literal bridges she crossed while
listening to Joni’s music, but the deeper metaphor she uncovers
during this conversation reveals that Joni Mitchell provided
Madison a bridge to cross the “moat” of her religious upbringing to
a place that opened up not only her musical world, but made her
available for all the opportunities that found her.